Mt Faifa, Saudi Arabia, November 2017 (the mountains behind me are Yemen)
[from FB post: November 11, 2017]
The War Zone
I live and work in a place that the US State Department states "should be avoided except for essential travel". Yesterday, I traveled right up to the border with Yemen. I sat atop beautiful Mt. Faifa, filled with luxury villas owned by locals who rent them out to rich people from Riyadh and Jeddah, and looked across a barren river valley to Yemen. The very porous border is now completely shut down (except for all the people that cross it for work and delivery of fruits and vegetables). Life goes on along the border as normal (I mean totally normal). And yet there is a war going on, people are starving to death in Yemen, and there is a lot of ill-will and tension. It defies comprehension when you actually see it. What is really real?
Additional comments:
Not too much has changed in the Saudi Arabia/Yemen conflict since I wrote this. It has calmed down, but it is still there - festering. The people of Yemen deserve more. Proxy wars never resolve anything and it is the locals who suffer. Just look to Vietnam and most recently Afghanistan.
Mt Faifa is also famous for something more than proximity to Yemen and villas - language. The people who live on and around Mt Faifa famously speak a dialect of Arabic that is so difficult to understand "it is virtually another language". I taught a young man from that area and he said, "Sir, it's not even Arabic". There you have it - not Arabic. One of the foundations of a nation state is language standardization. A national language unifies a country. The success stories are in Germany, Japan, and Indonesia. Dubious successes are found in France and Spain. Belgium, without a unifying national language, is always threatening to split. China is simply a disaster - ever heard of "Wu"? It is one of the most spoken languages on the planet.
The language of Mt Faifa and its impenetrability is not about building the modern Saudi state though, it is even greater. The "oneness" of Arabic is essential in Islam. Modern Standard Arabic is based on the Classical Arabic of the Quran. The Quran is and has always been in the Arabic spoken to the Prophet Mohammed by the Archangel Gabriel on behalf of God. It is eternal, unchanging. Nevermind that anyone speaking their local variety of Arabic from Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria might not understand each other at all - it is CRUCIAL that Arabic speakers all feel they speak the same language. Arab Linguists who have tried to champion the diversity of languages derived from Classical Arabic (as the romance languages derive from Latin) have been denounced by their peers and silenced. Hence, the people around Mt Faifa MUST BE SPEAKING ARABIC because they are Arab and Muslim. Again, nevermind that their local language bears no resemblance to any dialect of Arabic spoken anywhere. Will the language of Faifa persist? If the German and Japanese models prevail, yes! If the Chinese model, sadly, maybe not. The war swirling around Faifa is not just ideological it is even broader. A unique language and culture hang in the balance.